If you are a ticket broker or own a ticket related website you know first hand getting visibility on the major search engines is no easy task. Every year, many ticket websites spend thousands of dollars optimizing their websites for the search engines with hopes of getting more traffic. Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is a multi-billion dollar industry. However, is such a competitive industry such as ours it can be difficult to get and maintain search engine visibility when the rules are constantly changing. From Pandas to Penguins, it can be really hard to keep up with all the latest algorithm tweaks.

While we certainly do not have any magic formula to help you increase the visibility of your ticket website, we do have a way to increase the visibility of your ticket ads listed at Tickifieds.com. If you have been paying attention to Google lately, they have been on a mission to build up their social network aptly named Google+. Many SEO experts have hypothesized that Google’s dip into the social network arena is not only an attempt to attract more users to their products but to also improve their search results. One of the ways they are attempting to tie their social platform to the search engine results is by employing the rel=”author” tag. Unlike other social platforms, Google+ allows you to connect your social profile across the internet, and in a sense, validate your identify. This is done by identifying a Google+ profile id as an author of any type of content across the web.

One of the big advantages of tagging your content with your Google+ profile is that, over time, if you become a trusted source of valuable content, Google may show preference for your content when it displays search results. Although the above sentence is largely speculation, there is no doubt that Google is encouraging users to link their content to their Google+ profile. As a reward for people who employ the authorship markup, Google will display your Google+ profile picture next to the associated search engine result. These images have shown to drastically increase clicks-throughs so even if authorship doesn’t provide a boost in the search engines, people will be more likely to land on your page or ad.

Here are a few examples of a how a Tickifieds Ad looks when displayed in the Google search results with verified authorship markup.

So, now that we know its probably a good idea to start using the author markup on all your web content, how does one add this markup? Well, at Tickifieds.com we made it really easy! Just follow these steps below.

1). If you haven’t already, sign up for a Google+ profile at https://plus.google.com and be sure to include a profile picture with a “recognizable headshot”.

2). Find your Google+ Profile url. It should look something like mine : https://plus.google.com/u/0/114868684757175395718. To find yours, just log into Google+ and look for your profile picture in the upper right hand corner and select “View Profile”.

3). Log into your Tickifieds account and select “Edit My Profile”. Look for the field titled, “Google+ Author Profile” and paste in your Google+ profile url from step 2. Click submit to save your profile. We automatically add your Google+ profile with the rel=”author” tag to each of your ads.

4). The next step of the verification process is to add a reciprocal link back from your profile to Tickifieds.com. To do this, Click Edit profile, then click the Contributor To section on the right (depending on how many photos you have, you may need to scroll to see this section), and then click Add custom link. Enter Tickifieds.com, then click save.

5) Test your markup and see what author data Google can extract. Go to the Google structure data testing tool at: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets. Go back to Tickifieds and find the url for one of your ads and copy it. Paste the copied url to the Structured Data Testing Tool and click “Preview”. If it is all setup correctly, you will see your profile image appear next to the preview search result listing.

6). That’s it….you’re all done!

If you have any trouble setting this up feel free to let me know and we’ll get you setup!